We sent out an email a couple of weeks ago asking that people print the email and return it to us to support our application for re-registration with the Electoral Commission.

There was an excellent response enabling us to submit the signed forms yesterday. The Commission has come back to us requiring some more signatures as they have issues with enough of the forms to take us under the magic 500 required. I can assure you that we have a lot more than the required 500 members, it’s the signed forms we don’t have enough of. We are trying to get the process completed as quickly as possible hence the urgency.

It’s up to you! If you are able to print, sign and date this email then scan and email it back to xxx we will be able to complete that part of the registration process.

Thank you for your initial response, it is greatly appreciated. Your assistance with this request will get the job done.

Many thanks,

So looks like some of the forms were non-compliant, hence it may take even longer.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 10th, 2013 at 9:00 am and is filed under NZ Politics.
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As I’ve said before, Dunne needs to seriously consider rebranding. The name “United Future” carries unpleasant connotations for any of us able to remember gormless carpetbaggers like Larry Baldock, Gordon Copeland, Bernie Ogilvy, Murray Smith, Paul Adams and the rest of that ghastly result of Dunne’s faustian bargain with the mad fundies in 2000.

Why not rebrand as the Liberal Democrat Party of New Zealand, or Free Democrats, or something similar, reflecting his actual political views?

I didn’t get this email, it must have just been sent to members who hadn’t yet retutned signed paper. The Commission will no doubt be checking every i dot and t cross.

Re: renaming – that’s been discussed but probably won’t happen. There are a number of reasons, one being the procedure required to re-register names and logos with the Electoral Commission!

I don’t think the name is very important. Most of the public would not get “Liberal Democrat” and most won’t remember or won’t care about past issues.

Most people don’t care about the names ‘National’ or ‘Labour’, the latter especially hardly reflected the modern version of the party. Most of politics is personality based so the names of the leaders are probably more important than the party name.

Weren’t the government congratulating itself yesterday on their progress towards making 70% of government processes available electronically? Yet this involves signatures and paper as if it is still 1990. It’s a retrograde step and opposed to government policy.

I’ve never seen the point of signatures in this sort of situation. If you already have a sample signature to compare it to then it is a kind of crude manual biometric. If you don’t then its just a pen mark on paper… pointless.

peteremcc – It is the gesture and the ability to audit that counts. It is relatively easy albeit time consuming to audit 500 written and signed embership applications. It is potentially more difficult to audit electronic memberships. However the more memberships – written or electronic, the easier it is to audit since a small sample only needs to be checked.

For a party getting off the ground – requiring as a gesture of good faith 500 signed paper applications is a quite reasonable hurdle to have to jump to obtain registration.

In UF’s case, its officials were not prepared to put their hands on their hearts and state in front of a lawyer or JP they had 500 dinkum members. This would raise a sufficiently serious question about the state of its membership and database system as to require a repeat of the 500 paper membership process. That this has hiccuped raises serious doubts whether the party should even exist. One would have expected the party to make sure it had 500 ‘clean’ applications or a few thousand applications that would survive random checks.

peterwn – all the other parties assume they have 500+ verifiable members and sign each year on that basis but they know the Commission have never checked – and now they realise that they would struggle to come up with 500 verifiable memberships to the standard demanded by the Commission without a lot of work, that is, actually getting signed forms. Most membership records in most parties these days is electronic only.

Pete George – agreed in theory, but I do not think that the General Secretaries of National, Labour or Greens would have any struggle with signing a statutory declaration each year saying they have at least 500 members. This is the main enforcement control given the dire legal consequences of making a false declaration. Any audit would be by a quick glance of electronic records, and possibly a few statutory declarations from the membership database maintainers , especially where the claimed membership role is in the thousands. If forced into it, these parties, with reasonable prior warning, could quickly round up 500 valid signed paper membership applications, so why should EC waste everyones time in these cases.

Wouldn’t it be a laugh if other parties like NZ1 and Mana couldn’t meet the test that UF have to.
Question to DPF and Graham Edgerley what would it take to get the Electoral Commission to start an investigation . Could Joe Citizen go to the EC and say they had reason to believe that X Party could not meet the terms and conditions and would the EC be obliged to investigate

I am pretty sure that they will manage to get 500 members quickly and it would be wonderful if they got registered before United Future, just to prove that the problem isn’t with the Electoral Commission or the law, but UF’s inability to organize anything more complex than a piss-up in a brewery.

lastmanstanding – NZ First is most likely to be OK as it has a reasonably large support base. Mana did produce 500 clean written memberships first time round. While Hone might be a poor administrator, he does appear to have competent ‘back room’ support, so Mana is almost certainly ‘clean’. In any case since the UF scare, the smaller parties would have checked their positions and done something about it if need be.

Peter Dunne has always seemed to be a creepy person to me.
And I think he has been a disaster as Minister of Revenue. But your eyes would water over by the time I explained why he has been a useless Min of Revenue, as tax reform is such a boring subject.

But I feel the Electoral Office has been unfair in the way they seem to have been persecuting the United Future Party.
Now; if they could pursue the Mana and Maori parties with the same zeal, I am sure they would find a rats’ nest of phucked up folios and files. I cannot believe that those parties would have 500 subscription paying members. Their policies are aimed at people who receive money; not at people who pay money.